My PhD thesis — “Covert channel vulnerabilities in anonymity systems” — has now been published:

The spread of wide-scale Internet surveillance has spurred interest in anonymity systems that protect users’ privacy by restricting unauthorised access to their identity. This requirement can be considered as a flow control policy in the well established field of multilevel secure systems. I apply previous research on covert channels (unintended means to communicate in violation of a security policy) to analyse several anonymity systems in an innovative way.

One application for anonymity systems is to prevent collusion in competitions. I show how covert channels may be exploited to violate these protections and construct defences against such attacks, drawing from previous covert channel research and collusion-resistant voting systems.

In the military context, for which multilevel secure systems were designed, covert channels are increasingly eliminated by physical separation of interconnected single-role computers. Prior work on the remaining network covert channels has been solely based on protocol specifications. I examine some protocol implementations and show how the use of several covert channels can be detected and how channels can be modified to resist detection.

I show how side channels (unintended information leakage) in anonymity networks may reveal the behaviour of users. While drawing on previous research on traffic analysis and covert channels, I avoid the traditional assumption of an omnipotent adversary. Rather, these attacks are feasible for an attacker with limited access to the network. The effectiveness of these techniques is demonstrated by experiments on a deployed anonymity network, Tor.

Finally, I introduce novel covert and side channels which exploit thermal effects. Changes in temperature can be remotely induced through CPU load and measured by their effects on crystal clock skew. Experiments show this to be an effective attack against Tor. This side channel may also be usable for geolocation and, as a covert channel, can cross supposedly infallible air-gap security boundaries.

This thesis demonstrates how theoretical models and generic methodologies relating to covert channels may be applied to find practical solutions to problems in real-world anonymity systems. These findings confirm the existing hypothesis that covert channel analysis, vulnerabilities and defences developed for multilevel secure systems apply equally well to anonymity systems.

Steven J. Murdoch, Covert channel vulnerabilities in anonymity systems, Technical report UCAM-CL-TR-706, University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, December 2007.